


Wishes from the Cursed

by bellabeatrice



Series: Bella's Parkner Week 2019 [6]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Powers, Angst, Fairy Tale Elements, Hurt/Comfort, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Sort Of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-07
Updated: 2019-08-07
Packaged: 2020-08-11 10:14:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20151967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellabeatrice/pseuds/bellabeatrice
Summary: Demons like to take children in deals with desperate people. Sometimes, they return the children back to the world of mortals, but the Underground leaves its curse.In a little cabin in the woods by a lake, two cursed children learn to fall in love.Parkner Week 2019 Day Six: “Five Feet Apart ‘Cause They’re Not Gay” / Swimming / Hurt/Comfort





	Wishes from the Cursed

**Author's Note:**

> This is really different from what I usually write, so I hope you enjoy! Thanks for reading.

Harley believes in the power of human touch, the worst of humanity, and demons. 

His mother was young once. Young, desperate, and pregnant at sixteen. She was hopelessly in love with the senior boy who tutored her in physics, but he saw the baby growing in her stomach, and he ran away. Leah Keener was young, desperate, pregnant at sixteen, and alone, There’s no worse fate than that. 

Sometimes, people get so desperate that they stop praying to the Lord and start praying to the demons. The demons come from the Underground to bargain, and barter, and cheat desperate people. Most people who make a deal with a demon end up worse off than they began. It’s only if you’ve got nothing to lose that you end up better off. 

Leah Keener hit rock bottom, and she began praying to demons, cradling her swollen belly and begging for salvation. 

The demon named Brannimus appeared to her on the night of the new moon. “You been asking for a demon, little lady?” he hissed, slithering closer to where Leah lay crying in the dirt of the hare’s meadow. “You got yourself a good demon, here. Brannimus is the best demon of all, miss, yes he is. He’ll strike you a good deal.”

“I’m alone,” Leah told Brannimus, sitting up and wiping the tears away the best she could. “My lover, he left me, and I’ve got this baby on the way, and I don’t got a place to stay, or a bite to eat, or a dollar to my name. I need that boy of mine, Brannimus. I need him to kiss me right like he used to, and we’re gonna raise our baby together.”

“Ahh, so you’re in love. Them lover fools, they’re the most desperate of them all.”

“Yes, I’m desperate. I’m the most desperate of them all, and I’m begging you for that boy of mine back.”

“And you’ll have him, this I promise, but you must promise me something in return.”

“Anything, Brannimus. Anything, and it will be yours.”

“Them lover fools are the most desperate of ‘em all,” Brannimus repeated. His long tail flicked Leah’s stomach. “If you’re desperate enough, you’ll promise me your firstborn child.”

And that’s how deals with a demon are made. 

As soon as the baby was out of the womb, Brannimus the demon appeared to Leah and whisked her child away, leaving behind a screaming, bleeding mother and the pitying midwife. The baby disappeared, but it was still in the world, so they christened him Harley after the hare’s meadow where Leah made that demon’s deal. 

Five years passed until the baby was seen again. In that time, Leah’s lover wandered his way back to the demon’s ditch called Rose Hill. They had another baby, a baby girl, who was an angel untouched by any demon’s hand. At the sight of her, Leah’s lover cried tears of joy, and they named her Abigail, which means father’s joy. 

The name Harley took on another meaning: father’s sorrow. 

When baby Abbie turned two, and the missing baby Harley turned five, Leah heard a knock on the door. The hand knocked five heavy times, and she feared the Brannimus had appeared to her again to take her angel child away. What she found at the door was much, much worse. 

Demons like to take children in their deals. Usually, the children disappear forever in the demon’s den. Sometimes, they return. However, demons leave their mark, and the children they send back to the world of mortals are cursed. 

Harley is a cursed child. 

They call it Brannimus’ Barrier. No human can get within five feet of him, for he’ll start screaming like he’s being burned from the inside out. 

“Damn that demon,” Leah would say at night as she tapped Harley’s forehead with a five-foot-long pole in an imitation of a goodnight kiss. “That bastard Brannimus, dooming my child to a cursed life.”

Leah’s lover would come up behind her and gently take the pole from her. He would guide her from the basement they kept Harley in and take her upstairs to the bed they shared and their normal, angel daughter. Harley would lie on a flea-ridden mattress in the basement, and the sound of the rats would put him to sleep. He’d wake the next morning when the basement door opened, and Leah pushed in a plate of breakfast with her five-foot pole. 

Harley spent five years in the demons’ den Underground. He spends ten more in the basement underground. He vows to spend twenty more years above the ground, and then he’d spend the rest of forever in Heaven, where dead children go to play. 

When Harley is fifteen, he sneaks out of the basement in Rose Hill and walks north for two weeks until he finds a clearing in the woods by a lake that’s clear enough to see his reflection in it. 

He’s never seen what he looked like. He never wants to again. 

Harley spends a month chopping wood and a month building his little log cabin in the woods by a lake. On the first night he spends inside of it, snow falls over the North. He’s never seen snow before. He wishes it would always snow. 

Harley spends a year in his little log cabin in the woods by a lake. With the fish in the lake and the berries in the woods, he wants for nothing. He has an alpaca named Gerald to keep him company on lonely nights, and it’s peaceful. It’s all Harley ever wanted. He turns sixteen on a full moon in the middle of winter. 

The snow melts, and summer comes again. With it, comes five heavy knocks on his door. Harley warily pushes it open with his five-foot-long pole. 

On Harley’s doorstep stands a boy. He’s ethereal, and Harley knows he’s no mere mortal. He’s just not sure whether the boy is an angel or a demon. “Don’t come closer to me than the end of this pole,” Harley warns, taking several steps back so that the boy can enter and close the door behind himself. 

“My name is Peter.”

“What are you, Peter?”

“I am a cursed child running from a demon’s ditch.” 

Harley drops the pole to the floor. An act of acceptance, but not yet a gesture of trust. “My name is Harley, and I am a cursed child running from the demon’s ditch.”

Peter hails from a place called Queens, which makes Harley laugh. “With a royal name like that, I’m surprised it’s not an angel’s palace.”

“I’ve never seen an angel’s palace, and I don’t think they’re real,” Peter says with an angry fire in his eyes. 

“There’s got to be an angel’s palace, right? For every demon, there’s an angel.”

“I’ve never seen an angel either. All I ever see are demons.”

“What are you saying?” Harley asks, standing up. “That we live in a world with no angels, just demons?”

When Peter smiles, he shows all his teeth. The expression he wears is feral. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

Peter moves into Harley’s little log cabin in the woods by a lake. They section it off so they each have a side to themselves on opposite ends of the one-room house, and they share a common area in the center. If they’re careful, they manage to coexist around the five-foot pole Harley still carries with him as he walks around the house. 

“What’s your curse?” Harley asks one night. “Who cursed you?”

Peter’s story is similar to Harley’s. When he was three-years-old, his parents died, and he was given to an Uncle Ben and an Aunt May to be raised. They raised him right until he was ten, when Uncle Ben was shot in the head. Aunt May was poor, and she had to feed a boy that wasn’t even her own, so when the demon named Segroth appeared to her, she exchanged the boy to bring Uncle Ben back to life. Segroth took Peter away for five years, and when he was fifteen, he returned to Queens with a curse called Segroth’s Spider Bite. His senses were dialed to eleven. Everything was too loud, too bright, too much. For a year, he lived as a cursed child in a demon’s ditch, but Aunt May and Uncle Ben kicked him out, so he ran away to the woods “To find you, Harley. I think we were destined to find each other.”

Harley believes in the power of human touch, the worst of humanity, and demons. He doesn’t believe in destiny. 

“There’s no such thing as destiny, just desperation and the choices we make when we’re desperate.”

Weeks past, and summer’s almost over. When Peter turns seventeen, on a half moon in August, Harley makes a wild berry tart. They don’t have wax, so they stick a twig of wet, green wood in the center and light it on fire. It smokes too much to be a good candle, and it’s hard to blow out, but Peter manages anyway. 

“What did you wish for?” Harley asks. 

“To go swimming with you. Tonight.”

They strip to their shorts and go swimming by the light of the moon. It’s bright enough to see but dark enough to hide secrets, just how Harley likes it. 

Peter runs and jumps into the lake, sending up a wave of water that splashes squawking birds away. He comes up laughing. It’s bright enough for Harley to see the dark curls plastered to Peter’s glowing face and the way the light reflects off his wet, slim body, but it’s dark enough that Harley can’t read the expression in Peter’s shining eyes. He looks like an angel, Harley realizes, and he thinks that it’s a shame Peter had to be a cursed child because everything else about him reeks of angel grace. 

Harley looks like a demon. He wades into the water and stares at his reflection in the calm water, and all he sees are the features of a demon. 

For every demon, there is an angel, and Harley found his in a little log cabin in the woods by a lake. 

Peter creeps closer, and Harley realizes that he doesn’t have his pole. “Stay back. Five feet.” Peter is much farther away than five feet, but Harley is scared that if Peter comes any closer, he’ll do something reckless. 

“What, are you scared I’m going to seduce you or something?”

“I’m not gay,” Harley shoots back. “Gay is another demon’s curse, and if a child was cursed twice, than surely he’d be dead right now. I already have one curse, so I can’t be gay.” That’s what they told him, growing up in a basement in Rose Hill. That’s what they say down South.

“Gay isn’t a demon curse. It’s a human curse. A love curse.”

“Do you have it, this love curse?” Harley asks, backing slowly away. 

Peter steps forward boldly in response. “Yes.”

“Well, I don’t,” Harley demands, and he hates the way the panic creeps into his voice. Peter is twice-cursed, and surely no child can survive that, but here is one living and breathing and far too close for Harley’s taste. 

“How would you know? You’ve never loved a soul in your life.”

“I love you.” The words leave Harley’s mouth before he realizes what he’s saying. He chokes on shame on retches into the clear, calm lake. The wild berry tart tasted sweet going down. It tastes sour on the way back up. 

At least the vomit makes Peter back away. “That’s gay,” he says softly. “That’s love.”

Harley clambers out of the lake and runs inside the cabin. Peter doesn’t follow. 

There are two long months of miserable chill before the first snowfall. Harley keeps the fire lit and stomps up and down his cabin, kicking Peter’s things around and snapping all his five-foot poles in half. He spends cold nights wrapped in Peter’s blankets because Queens is colder than Rose Hill, and Peter had brought warmer blankets than Harley. The smell of the other boy, the scent of wild berries, birch wood, and summer sun, makes Harley nauseous, but he suffers through it all just to be a little bit warmer. 

Gerald disappears some time during the first month. Harley spends that day in Peter’s bed crying.

There are five heavy knocks on his door at sunrise on the day of the first snowfall. Harley pushes the door open with a broken, two-and-a-half-foot pole, but Peter is standing five feet away from the door, so Harley is safe. They don’t say any words. Peter just steps inside the cabin like he’s coming home after a long journey. He surveys the damage done, the way his things are scattered across the floor and how his blankets are all on Harley’s bed. He still says nothing, just cleans it all up and steals back his blankets, being mindful to keep five feet away from Harley, even without the full-length poles. They go back to living together like it’s summer instead of winter, and Harley can finally breathe a sigh of relief. 

“What does it feel like?” Harley asks one night. They’re curled up in chairs five feet apart in front of the fireplace. At Peter’s questioning look, he clarifies, “Touch. Human touch.”

Peter is quiet for a moment before answering. “Before I was cursed, before Uncle Ben and Uncle May took me in, I lived with my parents. Human touch. It’s the first form of communication. When you’re born, you don’t understand anything about the world, but you understand that your mother’s embrace is the safest place in this big, big world. Touch connects us, literally and figuratively. It comforts us, consoles us, excites us, makes us feel loved. We need touch like we need air to breathe.”

“I’ve lived this long without human touch. If I needed it like I need air to breathe, I’d have been dead three minutes after I was cursed.”

“I don’t know how you’ve lived this long without human touch. You’re the bravest, strongest person I know, Harley.”

The words make Harley’s chest ache in a warm way he doesn’t quite understand. “Thanks,” he mutters under his breath, and he hopes he looks sincere. He means it, he does, but he’s lost, and hurt, and confused.. 

“It’s better out here than in the demon’s ditch. In Queens, it’s noisy and bright and dirty, and it made everything hurt too much. After I was cursed, I couldn’t stand to be touched. No one really wanted to touch me anyway, but even touching the fabric of my clothes hurt too badly. Touch used to bring comfort to me, and now it only brings pain.”

“You’ll learn to live as long as I have without it. You’ll learn to live every longer. You’ll figure it out. I know you will. You’re the smartest person I know, Peter.”

Harley turns seventeen on a new moon in January. There are no berries to make a tart with and no green wood to make a candle out of, so they make do with maple syrup brittle and a dry stick that Harley has to blow out quickly before it burns the house down. 

“What did you wish for?” 

“To be able to feel human touch.”

Peter shakes his head. “You shouldn’t waste your wishes on undoing a demon’s curse. That’s a fool’s dream.”

The snow melts early that year, and Harley fears that Peter is going to leave again, leave Harley to face the miserably cold spring rains alone. Peter doesn’t leave though. He stays in the cabin and nurses Harley to health when he catches a nasty cold. His care consists of pushing cold rags and warm tea to Harley’s bedside with a new five-foot pole, but the gesture makes Harley smile. 

“Don’t leave me again,” Harley begs when his fever is at its highest. 

“Never.” Peter promises. “I will never leave you.”

Harley’s health returns with the summer sun. Peter leaves his worry behind in the mud of the spring rains, and they spend another summer as carefree boys who have a whole world to themselves in their cabin and their woods and their lake. 

Peter’s turns eighteen on a rainy day, and they can’t see the moon. They have their wild berry tart, but it’s storming too hard to go swimming. Instead, they dance in the rain, barefoot in the mud. Harley thinks it’s the most he’s ever heard Peter laugh. 

“What did you wish for?” Harley remembers to ask, once they’re dry and warming themselves by the fire. 

Peter turns to face him, and Harley’s heart stops a beat at Peter’s tear-stained face. “To dance in the rain with you forever.”

“That’s a fool’s wish,” Harley whispers back. “A foolish lover’s wish.”

It doesn’t matter. He’s just as much of a foolish lover as Peter. 

When the autumn chill comes and chases them back into the cabin, they feel pent up and reckless. “Do you think curses fade over time?” Peter asks as he paces up and down his side of the cabin. 

Harley finishes slicing the potatoes for dinner before replying. “No, but it would be nice if they did.”

He’s about to take the pot of roasted vegetables out of the fire when the pain hits him. It’s sudden, like a balloon of acid in his stomach had popped open, and its contents were corroding holes through his guts. The pain is over as soon as it begins, but Harley’s throat is sore from screaming, and he’s panting from where he lays on the ground, head dangerously close to the fire. 

“I’m sorry,” Peter says, and Harley has to close his eyes and swallow his rage down. 

“You should be,” he grits out. “What the hell were you thinking? You know the rules.”

“Harley,” Peter says softly. “Look at me.”

Harley looks at him, and Peter’s still standing far too close. There’s a broken five-foot pole in between Peter’s feet and Harley’s curled up body, which means there’s roughly two and a half feet in between them. Yet, Harley can’t feel the pain that’s supposed to come when Peter stands this close, the pain that hit him moments earlier. 

“How close were you standing when I, um, fell?”

“Less than two feet. This pole is one of shorter pieces.”

Harley takes a shuddering breath. Tears are pressing at his eyes, and he’s not exactly sure why. Pain, maybe, mixed in with hope and terrified confusion. “New rules. Two feet apart at all times.”

“Aye, aye, Captain,” Peter says with a ridiculous salute, and it’s enough to make Harley laugh. 

Their dinner is burnt, but neither of them really care. They’re eating dinner close enough to see the emotions in the other’s eyes, and it’s exhilarating. 

“I think I love you,” Peter says as they watch the first snowfall from in front of the fire. Harley chokes on his tea. 

“You think or you know?”

Peter considers it for a moment. “I think. I’m not really sure what love is, but I think it’s what I feel for you.”

“That’s fair enough,” Harley says, willing his heartbeat to resume a relaxed pace. 

“What about you? Do you love me?”

Harley sighs. “Yes. I told you that already, don’t you remember?”

“It’s nice to be reminded of it.”

They do their best to remind each other. Harley greets Peter every morning with a simple “I love you,” and wishes him goodnight with the same phrase every evening. Like clockwork. 

Peter, on the other hand, reminds Harley at random. “I think I love you,” he’ll say as Harley makes tea for the both of them in the morning, or as they curl up by the fire reading, or as they fish in the ice. It catches Harley slightly off-guard each time it’s said, but it never fails to bring a smile to his face. 

He wishes that Peter would drop the “I think,” but he’s a patient man, and he’d wait until they were both dead and well into the afterlife if that’s what it took. 

Harley turns eighteen on a half moon in January. “What did you wish for?” Peter asks, as soon as Harley hurriedly blows out the fire on a dry twig. 

“To love you forever,” he says, like the confession of a secret. 

“That’s a lover’s wish,” Peter chides him. 

Harley smiles. “Well, I have the lover’s curse.”

The spring rains wash away the winter snowfall, and the summer sun dries the spring rains. Through it all, two boys in a cabin in the woods by a lake grow closer, literally and figuratively. With every reminder and secret smile shared, they are able to close the gap between them slowly but surely. By the time the rains are dried, Harley and Peter can stand half a foot apart. It’s close enough to breathe in each other’s air and pick out every detail of the other’s face, but it’s still not close enough, not close enough to touch. 

Peter’s nineteenth birthday creeps up to them, and before they know it, the summer is nearly over, and Peter’s blowing out a wet green stick in a wild berry tart again. 

“What did you wish for?” Harley asks as they sit half a foot apart on the bank of the lake. 

“To touch you.” Harley closes his eyes and shakes his head with a fond smile. “No, listen to me. I just wished to touch you. You and only you. I will deal with the pain of touch from the rest of the world if it means I get to touch you and hold you in my arms. I want to show you what human touch is, Harley. Is that too big of a wish?”

Tears burn in Harley’s eyes, but he blinks them away. “Yes, but I hope it comes true anyway.”

Subconsciously, their hands inch closer together, and as the sun sets on their cabin in the woods by the lake, Harley feels a warm, electric touch on his finger.

He looks down. They’re hands are touching, fingertip-to-fingertip, and the realization knocks the breath out of Harley’s lungs. “I can touch you,” he breaths, letting his fingers dance over Peter’s palm. “I can _touch_ you.”

“And I can touch you.” Peter sounds like he’s crying, and Harley looks up in alarm. He wants to touch Peter, but he won’t if the other boy will feel any pain. However, Peter doesn’t look like he’s in pain. Instead, he’s letting salty tears drip into his grinning mouth. “Harley, I can _touch_ you, and it doesn’t even hurt.”

Human touch, Harley thinks, is incredible. He takes Peter’s hand in his own and relishes in its warm, comforting weight. Human touch is undeniable, he thinks as Peter’s lips press against his forehead. Human touch is maddening, he thinks. The two boys lay out by the lake in the fading light, pressed against each other in an impossible embrace. Human touch is everything. 

Harley believes in the power of human touch, the worst of humanity, and demons. But most of all, he believes in wishes.

They wake up by the lake to the wrath of the last summer storm and run shrieking into the cabin. Harley’s out of breath and laughing, and when Peter pulls him close, he feels like he’s on fire.

“I think this is an angel’s palace,” Harley says. “This cabin and these woods and that lake are an angel’s palace, and we are its angels.”

“We can’t be angels,” Peter whispers. “We’re touched with a demon’s curse.”

Harley stares at their intertwined bodies and snorts. “Are you sure about that?”

Peter doesn’t say anything. Harley thinks he’s never seen the boy look so confused.

In the cold months before the snowfall, the two boys touch each other as much as they can. It’s been years since Peter had been able to touch another person, and for Harley, it’s been a lifetime. One time, Peter touches Harley’s lips with his.

“That’s a kiss,” Peter tells him. “A true love’s kiss.”

It makes Harley cry, for some unfathomable reason. “I love you.”

“I love you too.”

After that, Peter stops saying “I think I love you” and starts saying “I love you.” He says it more often too, but it still makes Harley smile every time.

“We have the love curse,” he jokes, as they curl up together on Peter’s bed. Harley’s bed is cold, and it hasn’t been used in weeks. 

Peter kisses him. “That’s the best kind of curse there is.”

Snow blankets the ground when they wake up. Harley drags Peter outside with him, and they spend the morning throwing snowballs at each other. When it stops snowing, and the world is too still, Peter runs after Harley and catches him in his arms. 

“Got you,” he cries triumphantly, pressing kisses all over Harley’s face.

Harley swats at Peter with a laugh. “Never let me go.”

Peter promises, “Never,” and Harley believes him.

When Harley turns nineteen, the moon is black, and the world is dark. They feed each other maple brittle and cuddle in the bed they dragged to be close to the fireplace. “What did you wish for?” Peter asks.

“To live and die by your side, forever in this angel’s palace.”

Peter’s face is unreadable.

The spring rains come to wash the snow away, but it brings a plague with it. Harley catches it first, his body having never really recovered from the first time he caught the spring sickness. He sleeps all day in the bed by the fire and only wakes to vomit in the pot by his bed. Peter sleeps in Harley’s old bed, and Harley swears he hears Peter praying some nights.

“Cursed children can’t speak to the Lord,” Harley croaks out when he catches Peter praying.

A fire burns in Peter’s eyes. “You said we weren’t cursed anymore. The least I can do is try.”

Harley stops vomiting, but the fever still burns. Fire spreads, and Peter’s catches a fever too. He lies in bed by Harley because there’s no use being apart if they both have the plague anyway. They sleep most days away, sometimes trying to eat when they’re awake, but mostly they just clutch each other tightly and hope they never have to let go.

“Do you still think this is an angel’s palace?” Peter asks.

Harley smiles bittersweetly. “Yes, and I think we are dying angels.”

When the summer sun chases the spring rains away, it shines on two boys in a cabin in the woods by a lake. These boys are supernatural. They are mortal children with demons’ curses who live in an angel’s palace. They are also dying, but at least they are together. It is all they have ever wanted.

Death comes for Harley and Peter slowly. They don’t know how long it will take. Harley says they will be dead by summer’s end, but Peter says it will take another year. It doesn’t matter, they agree in the end. As long as they die together.

“Do you promise to love me, Peter? Right now in life and forever in death?”

Peter kisses every inch of fever-warmed skin on Harley’s body. “Yes,” he whispers as Harley cries out. “I will love you always.”

“Good.” Harley trembles when Peter pulls away. “Because I too will love you always.”

Harley believes in the power of human touch, the worst of humanity, and demons. He also believes in love because he is so in love with Peter Parker.

“You’re an angel,” he says, reaching out to cup Peter’s face. 

“We are both angels,” Peter corrects. “Dying angels, but does it really matter?”

_It doesn’t_ goes unsaid by both of them, and Harley believes. He believes in Peter, and somehow, along the way, he learned to believe in himself. 

“We’re both angels,” he agrees. He can see himself reflected in the light of Peter’s eyes, and he looks like an angel. “Dying angels, but we long as we’re together, it doesn’t have to matter.”

Peter pulls him close with a smile that borders on a laugh, and Harley’s too close to crying. They’re dying, but it doesn’t feel like dying. It feels like living.

Harley falls into Peter, and he lives and loves forever in death.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy birthday to me :) Catch me on Tumblr: @parknerplease


End file.
